Quantity Over Quality

Luca Wistendahl

lw124010@ohio.edu

Over the summer (and maybe even a little bit of last semester because I’m a slow reader) I read a book called “Merchants of Doubt”, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conoway. It’s tagline reads “How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming”. It’s an interesting book, if a bit of a slow read, and it analyzes instances in which the validity of scientific findings is brought into question and the information received by the public on these findings is consequentially garbled. The book essentially says the same thing that this article on the Guardian’s website says: organizations have been known to try to influence public opinion for their own personal gain.

An Example or Two

Sometimes these organizations are industries, like the tobacco industry, and sometimes they’re governments. Merchants of Doubt cites this instance in which a series of military analysts sent by the government to comment on the state of the war in Iraq in 2005. As the New York Times found out, however, many of these “analysts” had high stakes in military contractors--they had stakes in the very war they were intended to analyze. Such an incident isn’t all too dissimilar from this case of the Bush administration attempting to influence a pundit’s coverage of No Child Left Behind via a paid contract. It’s all the same: attempting to influence the public’s understanding to benefit one’s interests.

Power in Numbers

Astroturfing, the subject of The Guardian’s article, is unique, however. The Guardian defines astroturfing as fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies.” In the examples listed above, we don’t have see the kind of falsification of numbers that is the real threat behind astroturfing. There are only as many military analysts speaking to us over television as there are military analysts speaking to us over television, but now there are unquantifiably large numbers of false accounts--essentially false people for the purposes of this argument--that are out there on cyberspace running amuk. There’s power in numbers, and five fake accounts is objectively larger in number than just one real person’s account expressing an honest opinion on a forum. Yet you only need one person to run five fake accounts, and so we have a false proliferation of ideas which, false or not, will have an impact by sheer merit of their numbers so long as the seem legitimate.

So What Do We Do?

Astroturfing is a tricky problem to solve. It breaks one’s faith in scanning forums to gain a broad understanding of public opinion gleaned from a hundred different posts. I, however, don’t feel terribly affected. I try not to read too deep into forums for anything but very specific answers to specific problems (I’m a web developer, and forums can be gold mines of help for development problems). Additionally, I try to get my news from reputable and trusted platforms, and my comments from people I know. If I need to hear from a lot of people online, I’ll go to my some-hundred friends on Facebook.

One last suggestion I have, which I have admittedly not yet tried myself, is to read scientific journals. While this only addresses issues of science, Merchants of Doubt stresses that scientific journals contain information that’s closer to the truth of things; information that hasn’t yet been manipulated and then disseminated to the public through forums, newspapers, etc. Again, I have never picked up a scientific journal in my life, but I admit that Oreskes’ and Conoway’s book has tempted me to do so the next time I’m curious on the truth behind any scientific issue.